I took the plunge last weekend and loaded the latest Windows 7 Beta on my laptop. I decided to just go for it. I had already loaded it on a spare laptop from work, but until you use something on a day to day basis you don’t really get a good feel for it. Overall the experience has exceeded my expectations. Here is a list of things I like:

The most impressive thing was the easy of installation and driver support. I have an AMD Turion 64 X2 laptop. The laptop was loaded with Vista 32 bit. I decided to go all in and load the 64 bit version of the Beta. Install was clean and the first time I logged in my screen resolution was really low. However, after the first login Windows Update ran automatically. Once that was done and I restarted the machine and was happy to find that my video and audio where back to normal. I’ve been running for 5 – 6 days now smoothly and without a crash.

Another thing I have been happy with is the power management. I have three kids under the age of 6. So, I like to move around with my laptop while I keep one eye on them. The power on my laptop seems to last longer without sacrificing connectivity or performance.

Next, The new task bar is really useful. Instead of having multiple entries in the task bar for every window, Windows 7 groups them by application. This is big. For example when I’m using Outlook I frequently have multiple messages along with calendar entries, contacts etc open at once. Windows 7 shows one icon on the task bar.

Then when I hover on that icon it expands and shows all the windows opened related to Outlook.

Very Cool!

A couple things I don’t like so far.

Support for multiple monitors is a bit difficult. Maybe I just need some time to get used to it, but it took some extra clicks to get my second monitor configured. I also had to save my settings multiple times to get it to work. Not a big deal, but kind of annoying.

I also was disappointed that there is not support for mounting ISO files built into the OS. Also MagicDisk, which is the one I used on Vista, did not work. I found tons of blogs on this and finally loaded PowerISO. PowerISO worked fine, but the fact that this took so long bothered me.

I will post any other things as I come across them, so far I’m running without a hitch. The bottom line is that if you are thinking about trying it I would recommend it. It is beta software so buyer beware, but so far this buyer is very satisfied.